


Camp Lucas

by ViciousRhythm



Series: Reylo trope coverage [7]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Summer Camp, Competing camp counselors, F/M, Poe is mentioned, Ridiculousness, he is a star child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 09:45:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6001437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViciousRhythm/pseuds/ViciousRhythm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summer camp au with Ben and Rey competing for the honor of camp-wide victor (and taking care of a bunch of ten and eleven year olds, that too.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Camp Lucas

**Author's Note:**

> Somebody asked for this au, and it may take me a while (busy writing a much larger fic with EllieCarina at the moment as well), but I'll get to everything that is asked of me, I swear it!

Ben Solo knows Camp Lucas like the back of his hand, and as well he should, he’s been going since he was seven years old. The first couple of years his parents shipped him off for the summer, Ben had been less than thrilled. He’d had more interest in video games than the outdoors, and for most of the year, that’s still true. But at nineteen, Ben has grown oddly fond of the campgrounds, and fiercely protective of his position as the counselor whose boys always win the games at the end of the summer. And so, like the past four years, Ben shows up with a duffle full of t-shirts and jeans and shorts, whistle already around his neck and ready to whip a new group of preteens into shape.

It’s a decent haul this year, only one or two kids clinging to their parents, most of them already running around the main area of the camp. There are a few new faces among the counselors as well, including a girl with her hair tied back in not one but three buns, leaned down to talk to a little boy who looks like one of the reluctant ones. Ben watches her swipe away the little boy’s tears, smiling at him, and thinks she’ll be good at this.

He was right about the kids this year. The boys in Ben’s cabin are rowdy and Ben relishes the challenge the group of eleven year olds presents. He’s never been able to handle the older crowd, too aggressive for them, but eleven year old boys are just his speed. His mother says it’s because Ben never really matured much past that age, but he argues it’s because he remembers it and he knows how to play them. The balance between being the cool counselor and the one who’ll drag your sorry ass into the lake if you cross him is one Ben has down to an art. His boys may complain about him sometimes, but they end up loving him every year – he’s got the end-of-camp letters to prove it.

He taking them to the archery range when he runs into the girl from before. Her name is Rey, and they haven’t spoken, but he remembers it from the camp-wide introductions. She has a gaggle of small girls trailing after her, one perched on her hip who can’t seem to stop babbling at her, arms thrown expressively wide as she talks on. Her group is apparently scheduled for the same time as his at the range, and they hand over their kids to the instructors for the five minute introduction, retreating to stand in the shade.

“It’s your first year here, right?” Ben says when they’ve had a few moments of comfortable silence between them.

“Yeah,” Rey says, turning a grin on him that seems much too bright for someone who she’s just meeting. “I’m Rey.”

“Ben,” he says, because _I know_ is just such a creepy response. “What brings you here? Most of us go from camper to counselor when we get old enough.”

“I just moved here, actually,” she says, and now Ben can hear the accent in her voice. “But I’ve always liked working with kids, and a family friend told me about this place. I’m guessing you’re a former camper?”

“For years.” Ben might be imagining it, but he thinks she’s still smiling at him kind of a lot, and it makes his stomach twist. “I’ve been showing up for more than ten years now.”

“Wow,” she says, eyes going big. “So I bet you know the ins and outs of everything, huh?”

“Pretty much,” he shrugs.

“So, who’s the favorite for the competition at the end?” she asks with a glint in her eye. “I hear it’s pretty fierce.”

“Me,” he says firmly, not arrogant, because well, that win is pretty much assured to be his.

“Oh, really?” Her eyebrows raise at that, and the glint in her eye solidifies to a spark of challenge. “We’ll see about that.”

And she’s cute, yeah. And nice. But Ben is winning that competition if he has to fight her for it.

“I’ve won it four years running,” he says, and now he might be verging on arrogance. “You and your girls don’t have a chance.”

Her grin shrinks abruptly, arms folding over her chest. Ben feels his own spine stiffening and the easiness between them evaporates.

“Bring it, Benny boy,” she snaps at him.

The nickname immediately puts him on edge, reminds him of the shit kids he’d had to deal with when he was too young to have grown into his long limbs and his ears. Forget thinking she’s nice, this chick is going _down_.

He’s sure whatever response he would have given was going to be clever and biting, but they’re interrupted by the archery instructor calling them over. Their session is spent with Ben and Rey getting in each other’s way in between bouts of actually doing their job, and by the end of it, Ben is ready to yell at her to grow the hell up. He can see on her face that she’s annoyed with him as well. They gather their campers together and it’s a tense walk back to the main grounds, Ben resisting the urge to spout off petty insults about her aim.

“Good luck _losing_ this year,” she shouts back at him when they part ways.

If they weren’t standing in front of a bunch of kids, Ben would probably swear at her, but he settles for hollering back, “I don’t know where you get your delusions, laserbrain!”

“Nice comeback, nerd!”

Ben hates her.

-

They clash a few more times over the next month, though neither of them goes looking for the other. Ben’s boys back him up in his vendetta against Rey, shouting taunts at her and her girls anytime they pass each other, and he’s eternally indebted to them. By the third week, the rivalry between Ben and Rey is well known around camp, and the other counselors give them a wide berth whenever possible. Ben is busy pushing his boys to be their best, because this year is more important than any other. He will _not_ let Rey take the win from under him, and he’s only satisfied when the whole cabin is consistently falling asleep semi-exhausted. They’re going to kick ass this year.

It’s one such night, when Ben is listening to the boys’ snoring and plotting how to beat Rey that there’s a tapping at the door. He ignores it at first, putting it off as a branch or some critter, but the tapping comes back, more insistent this time. He climbs out of bed to check on it and when the door opens, he’s met with three little girls staring up at him.

“Can I help you?” he says after a second, not sure what he’s supposed to do with wayward girls in the middle of the night.

“Are you Mister Ben?” the central girl asks.

“Yeah,” he says slowly. “Which cabin are you girls from? Lights out was a while ago.”

“We’re in Rey’s cabin,” one of the others pipes up.

“We wanted to ask you to stop being mean to her,” the third says.

They all have matching frowns, somewhere between angry and sad, and Ben is completely baffled.

“I’m not-“ he starts, sighing and crouching down to their level. “Look, Miss Rey and I are…playing. It’s a game, to see who’s going to win the competition at the end of camp, right? She knows that.”

“But,” one of them says. “She gets really mad about you.”

“Yeah,” another backs her up. “She says you’re pop- pompmous. That’s bad.”

Ben bites his lip to keep his response to himself. So Rey thinks he’s pompous, huh? He’s a little pleased he gets under her skin the way she does to him, if he’s being honest. It would be best not to tell anyone that, he’s pretty sure.

“Well, that’s between your counselor and me,” he says after a moment, standing and closing the door behind him. “Now, you girls need to get back to your beds. Let’s go.”

Rey is bleary-eyed when she answers the door, hair a complete tragedy. She makes a face at him instinctively, and then she catches sight of the little girls surrounding him, one holding onto the tips of his fingers as she has been the whole walk over.

“I think these belong to you,” he says drily.

“Girls,” she gasps, dropping to their level. “What are you doing out of bed? Jess, did you talk them into this?”

The dark-haired girl on Ben’s left shakes her head vigorously, shifting out from behind him.

“We got elected,” she says defensively. “Everybody wanted to ask Mister Ben to stop being mean to you.”

“Sweetie,” she starts, glancing up at Ben for a second, who makes a face like ‘don’t ask me to get involved’. “You don’t need to bother Ben like that. We’re grown ups and if I have a problem with him, I can talk to him.”

“So you’re not mad?” the girl clinging to his fingers asks.

“I _am_ upset with you for sneaking out of bed,” Rey says firmly. “But I won’t be too mad if you hop back in there right now.”

All three girls jump to it, leaving Ben and Rey standing on the front steps of the cabin alone.

“So,” he says into the awkward silence. “I guess you talk about me a lot, huh?”

Rey’s brow furrows. “Get bent, Solo.” And she slams the door in his face.

In spite of her anger, Ben strolls back to his own cabin with a grin on his face that could, by some people, be called shit-eating.

-

There’s a certain sort of lightness to their rivalry after that, if only from Ben’s side. He knows his boys are a force to contend with, they’ve got the best scores in archery, only manage to lose an oar every fifth time they go on the lake, and overall Ben’s proud of them. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t take every opportunity afforded to him to let Rey know they’re going to wipe the floor with her girls, of course. That’s only to be expected.

Rey, on the other hand, seems to have gotten even more fed up with him, and she’s the reason the prank war starts. It’s a very small thing, one of the girls managing to get under a lunch table unnoticed and tie Ben’s shoelaces together, but it kicks off an all-out war. It’s a solid week of water buckets over doorways and Oreos filled with toothpaste and toiletries suspended in jello. It comes to a head when Ben and his boys ambush Rey on their night walk making some pretty admirable bear noises, and Ben is introduced to Rey’s very solid right hook. Two mornings later, he wakes up in the middle of the lake and kind of feels like maybe he deserves that one.

Thankfully, Ben wakes up slowly at best, so he doesn’t have the mental capacity to panic and tip himself off his mattress. Instead, he sits up by increments, looking around the water surrounding him with a dazed sort of disbelief. He should have known someone was going to end up on the lake at some point, it’s so obvious. He almost goes back to sleep, just to put off the swim back to shore, but wakeup call will be any time now, and he has a group of eleven year olds to take care of.

It’s stupidly cold this early in the morning, and Ben is shivering when he makes it back, Rey waiting for him with an entirely smug look on her face. The bright red streaks in her hair suit her, he thinks a little meanly, considering he’s the reason she had hair dye in her shampoo in the first place.

Dripping all over the dock, four days before the camp-wide games, Ben sticks his hand out in front of him.

“Truce?”

Rey looks taken aback for a few seconds, like he’s going to pull something on her, sodden and fresh from the lake as he is. She does eventually step forward, though, and shake his hand.

“I think we’ve gone far enough,” she says, not unkindly.

“Agreed.” Hands free, Ben peels his shirt off from where it’s clinging uncomfortably to his spine, making him shiver even more. “We call an end to the pranks, and may the best man win at the games?”

“Yeah,” Rey says, eyes firmly on his own. He can feel his hair stuck to his forehead and his pajama pants sagging on his hips, and he’s pretty sure she’s trying not to laugh at him.

She leaves him like that, and Ben makes the uncomfortable walk to his cabin.

-

For all intents and purposes, the last full day of camp is supposed to be a break for the counselors. There are no activities taking place besides the camp-wide competition, and it’s overseen by the adult instructors, so the counselors can feel free to wander around and socialize after two months of taking care of a bunch of kids. Ben has traditionally spent the day with his boys anyway. He doesn’t have any real friendships with the other counselors, and the competition is close to his heart. This year is no different.

He’s there to cheer them on, and high fives Poe when the kid manages to break the camp record for the obstacle course for a full seven seconds. He doesn’t see Rey and her girls until halfway through the day, when the round robin setup put them against each other in a game of capture the flag. Obviously, the counselors can’t participate, so they’re both relegated to the sidelines. It’s about a minute in when Rey hooks her hand around his elbow and starts pulling him away.

Ben puts up a token protest – he’d actually like to be there for his boys – but he’s curious as to why Rey’s decided to drag him off. She stops behind the mess and Ben gets no more warning than that before she’s kissing him. He’s so surprised by this turn of events, in fact, that he doesn’t respond for long enough that Rey backs off.

“Are you okay?” she says.

“Why did that-?” Ben breaks off and clears his throat. “Why?”

“Was that not where we’ve been headed?” Rey asks, sarcastic, but a little bit genuinely worried under it.

“I mean,” Ben starts. “I’m definitely not opposed.”

“Good,” Rey says, and promptly drags him down to her level by his hair so she can kiss him again. She didn’t pick a great hiding spot, and anyone could walk by and see them making out behind the mess hall, but Ben goes with it anyway. It isn’t every day a pretty girl decides she wants to make out with him in spite of him being kind of an ass to her for over a month. Then again, she’d given as good as she got, and Ben is certainly still into her, competition notwithstanding.

When he’s a little out of breath and his lips feel kind of bruised, Ben puts his hands on her hips and pushes her back a few inches. Rey gives him a mildly annoyed look, but lets him speak.

“That game isn’t going to last forever.”

“No,” she agrees, and goes on her toes for a second to nip the point of his chin, which is dumb and still kind of awesome. “But aren’t we supposed to be a little bit off-duty right now?”

“Irresponsible,” he says, accusingly. “I don’t know about you, but I have a competition to win.”

“You have a competition to _lose_ , you mean,” Rey says, pressing her hands against his stomach. “I think those boys can manage to get their asses kicked with or without you present.”

“Just cause you decided to make out with me doesn’t mean I’m going to let them go easy on you,” Ben says primly.

Rey snorts. “That was barely making out, Ben.”

“Whatever.” Hands still on her hips, he tugs her forward again. “Kissing me is not going to get you a win, either way.”

“We’ll see about that,” she says against his mouth, and then she’s spinning away from him and he follows her back to the field where their campers are finishing up the game. His boys win, but just barely, and Rey kindly reminds him that not everything rides on capture the flag. He and the boys still celebrate their victory anyway.

In the end, Ben’s cabin does win the overall competition. He’s not smug about it, really, because they worked for it. He’s just proud of them and relieved he doesn’t have to listen to Rey rub his nose in it.

“Next year,” Rey tells him after they’re announced the winning cabin, “you’re mine.”

Ben doesn’t bother to check if the boys are occupied, and he’ll probably get a talking-to for it, but everyone is heading home tomorrow and he’s a bit high on his win. He kisses her, and evidently the boys are not occupied, because he can hear them send up a shout, one voice saying _finally_ carrying over the rest. He thinks it’s Poe, but doesn’t bother to check.

“Why wait til next year?” he says, and see, he can be snappy and clever. It happens.

“You’re ridiculous,” Rey tells him, shoving him back, but she’s waiting with her duffle by his car when all the kids are packed into their own buses and cars the following morning. He doesn’t even know where home is for her, he realizes abruptly. If she’s expecting a ride, hopefully it’s not too far.

“Going somewhere?” he asks, tossing his own bag into the backseat.

“Hopefully,” she says. “I have it on good authority we’re going the same place.”

“Is that so?” He watches her throw her bag in next to his, bemused, but doesn’t stop her.

“Yep.” She grins up at him. “You know a man by the name of Luke Skywalker?”

“My uncle?” he asks, confused.

“Also the old guy who offered to let me crash on his couch as a favor to my grandfather,” she says, smile widening. “Think you can give me a ride there?”

Ben's life is not normally this fortunate. He doesn't just meet girls that are willing to fight with him and kiss him and shove themselves into his car and follow him home. But hey, maybe everything else was building up karma points for Rey to happen. Either way, Ben isn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he climbs into the car with her.

"Yeah, I think I can handle that."


End file.
